Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Netherlands parliament makes open standards mandatory

joinup.ec.europa.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 35 posts

Re: Netherlands parliament makes open standards mandatory

#11

Post by nxc18 »

A lot of the interest in mandating open standards, at least a few years ago, was targeted at the dominance of MS Office. That's interesting nowadays because:

- MS Office's default file formats are open standards with open source libraries/ reference implementations - MS Office (both desktop and web app) can handle ODF very well nowadays.

At least for small business and home users, Google docs has become increasingly dominant with surprisingly little concern for long-term document accessibility. For example, Google Drive will only sync down links to Google doc files on desktop. Aside from manually exporting every single document you have in the preferred format, there is no way to get your documents for backup/archival purposes, and good luck switching to another service/software. It would be nice to see a little interest in standards/compatibility for google docs now that so many businesses use it.

Re: Netherlands parliament makes open standards mandatory

#12

Post by buovjaga »

tremon wrote: post #3

Note that this isn't a law (yet). This is a house initiative (motion?) that requests the current government to: - mandate by law the use of open standards - publish its knowledge about open source software through normal publication channels The second provision is a small step towards creating a knowledge-sharing platform regarding the use and deployment of open source software in both government and business. The o…

> I don't expect big changes from this, I suspect that MS Office Open XML would also be considered an open standard.

https://www.forumstandaardisatie.nl/lijst-open-standaarden

https://www.forumstandaardisatie.nl/standaard/odf

Unable to locate OOXML

Re: Netherlands parliament makes open standards mandatory

#13

Post by tremon »

nxc18 wrote: post #11

A lot of the interest in mandating open standards, at least a few years ago, was targeted at the dominance of MS Office. That's interesting nowadays because: - MS Office's default file formats are open standards with open source libraries/ reference implementations - MS Office (both desktop and web app) can handle ODF very well nowadays. At least for small business and home users, Google docs has become increasingly…

with open source libraries/ reference implementations

Citation needed? FAFAIK the reference implementation is closed source, and there are no libraries -- only a powershell module that is actually a wrapper around the Word/Excel OLE objects.

Re: Netherlands parliament makes open standards mandatory

#14

Post by matt4077 »

dhimes wrote: post #9
mtgx wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those problems are anywhere close to being insurmountable. You just need competent people in the government to implement the right policies and ask for the right things in laws. Just an example: if the EU as a whole said that by mid-2018, all document services and tools that work in the EU need to support ODF by default, then that is what would happen, and this issue would disappear. The problem is you still…

None of those problems are anywhere close to being insurmountable. You just need competent people in the government What's the word that means the opposite of tautology again?

What's the word that means "uninformed person spewing tired cliches" again?

The EU bureaucracy is actually pretty good regarding open standards. They publish most documents in html/doc and pdf, see for example http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/FR/TXT/?uri=CELEX:520...

They have also adopted the Akoma Ntoso standard internally, meaning all legislation is crafted in standardized semantic xml (as well transcripts, court proceedings & decisions etc). The public launch should happen some time early next year, and it'll allow anybody to do the kind of fun stuff you can do with a meticulously annotated, machine-readable history of 40 years of governing.

Re: Netherlands parliament makes open standards mandatory

#15

Post by christophilus »

nxc18 wrote: post #11

A lot of the interest in mandating open standards, at least a few years ago, was targeted at the dominance of MS Office. That's interesting nowadays because: - MS Office's default file formats are open standards with open source libraries/ reference implementations - MS Office (both desktop and web app) can handle ODF very well nowadays. At least for small business and home users, Google docs has become increasingly…

I agree with this. Even if MS formats were all proprietary, proprietary formats can generally be hacked/decoded/understood. Closed remote storage services on the other hand, can hold your data hostage, and there's not much you can do about it.

Re: Netherlands parliament makes open standards mandatory

#16

Post by rpedroso »

matt4077 wrote: post #10
adrianN wrote: post #7

All software used by and written for the government should be open source, just like all research paid for with government funds should be open access.

All software used by governments should be whatever is best in terms of features/price/security/etc. Open Source is nice but not really important. All data, however, should be in documented, standardized, open formats. Where it makes sense, software should have APIs using common standards. Where it's possible without revealing national secrets or personal information, those APIs should be open to the public,

Public auditing of voting terminals strikes me as a place where open source of government-used software matters.

Re: Netherlands parliament makes open standards mandatory

#17

Post by kirushik »

rpedroso wrote: post #16
matt4077 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All software used by governments should be whatever is best in terms of features/price/security/etc. Open Source is nice but not really important. All data, however, should be in documented, standardized, open formats. Where it makes sense, software should have APIs using common standards. Where it's possible without revealing national secrets or personal information, those APIs should be open to the public,

Public auditing of voting terminals strikes me as a place where open source of government-used software matters.

And the problem always is: how are you going to verify that the terminal you're using is running precisely the version of software you've seen?

There's an awesome online course touching all those topics and then some, from J. Alex Halderman, Associate Professor in University of Michigan. It's called 'Securing Digital Democracy' and is available on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/digital-democracy

Re: Netherlands parliament makes open standards mandatory

#18

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

rpedroso wrote: post #16
matt4077 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All software used by governments should be whatever is best in terms of features/price/security/etc. Open Source is nice but not really important. All data, however, should be in documented, standardized, open formats. Where it makes sense, software should have APIs using common standards. Where it's possible without revealing national secrets or personal information, those APIs should be open to the public,

Public auditing of voting terminals strikes me as a place where open source of government-used software matters.

That's where it matters least because it doesn't solve the problems with electronic voting computers.

Re: Netherlands parliament makes open standards mandatory

#19

Post by rpedroso »

kirushik wrote: post #17
rpedroso wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public auditing of voting terminals strikes me as a place where open source of government-used software matters.

And the problem always is: how are you going to verify that the terminal you're using is running precisely the version of software you've seen? There's an awesome online course touching all those topics and then some, from J. Alex Halderman, Associate Professor in University of Michigan. It's called 'Securing Digital Democracy' and is available on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/digital-democracy

That's a good point, and thanks for the recommendation!

Re: Netherlands parliament makes open standards mandatory

#20

Post by 19870213 »

tremon wrote: post #13
nxc18 wrote: post #11

A lot of the interest in mandating open standards, at least a few years ago, was targeted at the dominance of MS Office. That's interesting nowadays because: - MS Office's default file formats are open standards with open source libraries/ reference implementations - MS Office (both desktop and web app) can handle ODF very well nowadays. At least for small business and home users, Google docs has become increasingly…

with open source libraries/ reference implementations Citation needed? FAFAIK the reference implementation is closed source, and there are no libraries -- only a powershell module that is actually a wrapper around the Word/Excel OLE objects.

There is Apache POI for the JVM.

https://poi.apache.org/overview.html

Post reply on HN